Adding pan and tilt to a webcam

[Brent] and his wife wanted a way to provide more family time for Grandparents that lived far away. They tried a webcam, but their daughter just didn’t oblige by staying in the frame. Instead of chasing her around the room with with the camera he added pan and tilt features to the device. He settled on IR control using a common television remote, similar to our USB remote control receiver tutorial except that it drives servo motors instead of forwarding signals over the serial connection. [Brent] used a Picaxe 08M, connecting two servos together as a base on top of the project box. If you try this yourself there’s a lot of room to grow. Once you’ve assembled the hardware it wouldn’t be too hard to make this web enabled so that Grandpa can click on a web interface to look around the room.

For web-based steering, an alternative would be a couple of Phidgets-controlled servos via one of their language interfaces, Java or Python being the most obvious. They used to support Perl, but I didn’t put enough work into a CGI to get it working remotely.

Unfortunately it is more me ranting about an idea I had, but you get the basic idea of what is going on from the pictures. If people are interested I’d do a tech write up / provide code.

I’m using php (sorry everyone) to communicate with the MC, mjpg-streamer for the video feed, and ajax/jquery to make everything look awesome. I have plans to expand the whole thing out into an awesome robot if I get time over winter break.